As someone who has been involved with trying to rank sites in search engines for almost ten years, there is one phrase I hear all the time that has always driven me nuts:

“SEO takes a long time.”

While I can agree that a new site is not going to rank for a highly-competitive head term on the day they go live, there are still many terms they can rank for and start to drive traffic to their site right away. Because of this prevailing thought within the SEO community, SEO’s and marketers in general are continuously missing out on seasonal opportunities where top organic rankings can be achieved.

Over the past year, we have worked with a client who is in a very seasonal business and we have been able to consistently beat their competitors by employing a few basic principles. These principles are not rocket science but they are highly effective. The little secret which makes seasonal SEO so effective is that a few years ago the search engines implemented “freshness” as a factor. This means that NEW content and NEW links carry a little more weight for a short period of time. This period of time is generally seven to ten days. This means that if site content and link building can be timed right, then top rankings can achieved over the seasonal period.

The results we have seen by employing these strategies have been pretty incredible to say the least. Our top client employing this strategy just had the benefit of seeing an increase in overall site revenue from organic traffic over the last seasonal period, of in excess of 1,400%. All this was done in a down economy and helped them to balance out other under-performing areas of their business.

Of course, there are challenges with getting sites to rank in natural search results but those typically lie more with the speed with which things can be

implemented and how much bye-in you receive. It has always been my experience that there are keywords which are vulnerable and can be exploited by the savvy. This is precisely why Matt Cutts has a job today and, despite the rhetoric, the search engines are still a step behind. If you wish to be successful in the short term then just follow some basic guidelines, be realistic with keywords, trust the experts, and act quickly.